


Captain Fluffy

by telm_393



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Cats, Fluff, Gen, Pets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:11:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve gets a cat, and starts making a place for himself in the 21st century.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captain Fluffy

**Author's Note:**

> This is all extremely self-indulgent fluff fic written at four in the morning after looking at too many adorable gifs of cats, forgive me.

Steve finds the cat late at night, while he's taking one of his walks. It's starting to snow and he's trying to get back to the Tower as soon as humanly possible, because he hates snow, but the poor thing is meowing pitifully from an alley. When Steve takes a closer look at the ball of fur, he's surprised to notice that it doesn't have an eye. It doesn't look like a new injury. The cat's been out on the streets for a while, but it seems like it's gotten sick, and it's probably disoriented. 

There's no frothing from the mouth or anything, so Steve just picks the cat up and brings him back to Stark Tower. He's not even sure he's allowed to keep pets, but there's no reason why he shouldn't. 

He takes it to the common room, which is really just the living room on his own floor, but everybody's taken over it like it's the common room, so that's what he calls it.

Bruce and Tony are sitting side by side on the couch, watching TV.

Tony gasps in his overstated way, and says, "Cap, I didn't take you for a cat person!"

The funny thing is that Steve's never really been a cat person, he's never really been an animal person at all, but lately the idea of having an animal around to keep him company has been appealing (he's not sure where the idea came from, but wherever it did, it stuck with him).

"I don't know," he says before saying anything to Tony. "I think it's sick."

The cat's fur is freezing, but it is really cold outside, and Bruce comes over to take a closer look, even though he's not a veterinarian, he even absentmindedly states that fact before brushing at the cat's nose. "It feels wet, I think that's good." He looks closer at the cat, at its matted fur and skinny body, and smiles, then makes a face when the cat sneezes one, twice, three times.

"I don't know, maybe it has a cold or something?"

"Maybe," Steve agrees. He just hopes the cat will survive the night.

"I'll call in a vet tomorrow," Tony says from where he's fiddling with his fancy phone on the couch.

"Thanks, Tony," Steve says quietly, looking into the cat's face, studying its color. Black, ink black, with little white paws. If Steve were a less creative sort, he'd name it (him, Steve eventually confirms, he'd name him) something like Mittens.

He names him Fluffy instead. 

It turns out that Fluffy's just a bit worse for wear. He does have a cold, but it'll go away, and the main problem, really, is that he's half-starved. He's neutered, though, so the vet guesses that Fluffy was a house cat before being a street cat.

Steve thinks Fluffy probably had a dark past. He decides this while looking into the cat's huge golden eye, studying the scars across his face. 

"It doesn't really matter," Steve murmurs, half-asleep. "We all have dark pasts here."

Clint laughs at Fluffy's name, calls him Captain Fluffy instead, but his laughter has a delighted edge to it that Steve's never heard before, and he and Fluffy spend a lot of time up in the rafters together.

Thor is overjoyed at the prospect of having a pet. Apparently he had many on Asgard, and though he does briefly wonder how long it will take for Fluffy to be big enough to ride ("Never," Steve says quickly. "Never ever,"), he mostly just seems to enjoy picking Fluffy up and letting him climb onto his giant shoulder. Fluffy seems rather pleased with that arrangement as well. 

"Well, we don't have to get one of those fake trees for him to climb," Tony says, pretending not to smile while Thor bustles around the kitchen making toast with Fluffy perched on his shoulder like a pirate's parrot. "We have a Norse god instead."

Natasha isn't prone to overt displays of emotion or fondness, so Steve doesn't really think she cares about the new addition to the Avengers family (which is already a term so sentimental only Steve can say it with a straight face) until one day he walks in on her reading a book while petting Fluffy, who is curled up on her lap half-asleep. 

The whole thing's so domestic that Steve has to blink hard just to make sure it's real.

"Purring is calming," Natasha says without even looking up at Steve. 

Steve, having heard the same from Bruce, just nods and smiles and heads into the kitchen, where Tony is sitting at the table, drinking probably his thousandth cup of coffee today. "I wonder if cats get drunk, and if so, how," Tony muses.

Steve snorts out a laugh. "If you kill my cat, Tony, so help me God."

"I wouldn't kill him," Tony whines. "Just experiment."

"Don't experiment on him," Steve says, not as sharply as he could've, considering that he knows Tony's joking. "He doesn't need that."

"He'll just claw me half to death anyway," Tony grumbles, half-asleep. "Captain Kitty. Fluffy the Ferocious. Hey, that's pretty good, you should try to get him to answer to that."

Steve smiles gently. "Go to sleep."

Tony nods like he's only just considering sleep as a viable alternative to whatever he's been doing for the past forty-eight hours, and stumbles out of the kitchen.

Steve makes himself some tea and goes to the common room to read next to Natasha.

He feels at home here, at least sometimes. Enough, at least, to stay.

+

(Early on, when Steve's just been unfrozen and is always staring out into space as if he can see into the past again, touch the memories that come to him clear as day if he gets lost in his head enough, he has to talk to a SHIELD-issued psychologist.

"I don't have anybody here," he says after a few sessions of silence.

"Maybe you could get a pet." 

Steve almost laughs at that, but laughing feels like a sin, so he catches himself before he can. "I hate animals," he says, in the end.

What he doesn't say is I'll just end up loving it, and it'll just end up dying.)

+

Steve goes to sleep at night with Fluffy at the foot of his bed, now, and it makes him not feel so alone, when night after night he wakes up cold and scared, the sound of gunshots ringing in his ears and the feeling of Bucky slipping away still too real.

He used to just lie in his bed and shiver, even after he left the SHIELD quarters and settled in at Stark Towers, but now Fluffy always crawls up to him sometime during the night, lies down just in front of his face so that when he wakes up, he rolls onto his side and is greeted with an eyeful of long, black fur that's gotten pretty shiny.

It makes his clenched lungs finally let him take a breath, and the way his frozen fingers warm up when they run through Fluffy's fur always makes Steve feel real again.

It's a welcome feeling.


End file.
